Short range wireless communication and personal area networks will soon proliferate in common household products as well as mobile business products. Currently many products that have wireless capability are incompatible. Bluetooth technology allows for the replacement of the many proprietary cables that connect one device to another with one universal short-range radio link. Bluetooth technology could replace the cumbersome cables used today to connect a laptop to a cellular telephone or between other devices such as printers, PDA's, desktops, fax machines, keyboards, joysticks or virtually any other digital device. Refrigerators, microwave ovens, dish washers, laundry washers & dryers, stereo, television, digital video disks, video games, lighting, irrigation, cooling and heating systems among others may also take advantage of such short-range radio links.
Bluetooth radio technology further provides a universal bridge to existing data networks, a peripheral interface, and a mechanism to form small private ad hoc groupings of connected devices away from fixed network infrastructures. Designed to operate in a noisy radio frequency environment, the Bluetooth radio uses frequency hopping scheme to make the link robust. Bluetooth radio modules avoid interference from other signals by hopping to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving a data packet. One drawback of the current Bluetooth technology is the reliance on the master device to act as an intermediary between all other communication devices acting as slaves to the master device. This requirement that single device be a part of all communications reduces throughput throughout the entire system.
The Bluetooth system supports both point-to-point and point-to-multi-point connections, but the current specification limits the number of slave devices that a master can control to seven devices. Referring to FIG. 1, a standard Bluetooth 1.0 system or piconet 15 is shown having a control channel or master device 2 with several slave devices, namely devices 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9. Note, that although devices 7 and 10 are within range to form a portion of the piconet 15, the master device 2 would need to cease communications with two of the slave devices (from 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9) under the Bluetooth 1.0 standard in order to control and communicate with slave devices 7 and 10. Several Piconets can be established and linked together ad hoc, where each Piconet is identified by a different frequency hopping sequence, but again a limit is placed on the total number of devices linked. All users participating on the same Piconet are synchronized to the same hopping sequence.
Although the Bluetooth radio is more robust than other systems operating in the same frequency band (particularly since the Bluetooth radio typically hops faster and uses shorter packets), the current Bluetooth system still needs a method and system for efficiently and dynamically controlling talk groups created from groups of slave devices operating under control of a master device. In other words, there is a need for a system that has higher data transfer efficiency between slaves that eliminates bottlenecks at the master. Ideally, such a system can be compatible with Bluetooth 1.0 requirements such as high data rate, peer-to-peer networking, and low cost, but such compatibility should not be considered a limitation in accordance with the claimed invention.